Karzai Is Trying to Keep His Sway After Term Ends

Despite any ill will, American officials are still counting on President Hamid Karzai to help mediate what is expected to be a messy transition in Afghanistan.Credit
Wakil Kohsar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

KABUL, Afghanistan — American officials have ignored him, and Afghanistan’s presidential contenders have tried to persuade voters that they will be different from him. But those hoping to see President Hamid Karzai slip into a quiet retirement may be disappointed in the months to come.

Then he blessed two of the three leading contenders with tens of thousands of dollars from his office’s slush funds, hedging his bets that at least one candidate open to his influence will make it to a runoff, according to senior Afghan officials. It may be well into June before that second vote can be held, and Mr. Karzai will remain president in the meantime.

Few who know Mr. Karzai personally, including some of his critics, see a naked power grab in the president’s maneuvering. They say Mr. Karzai is driven by a deep-seated belief that he is Afghanistan’s indispensable man, uniquely suited to guide the country through the tumultuous years of transition ahead. That starts with the election, but Mr. Karzai’s ultimate aim, the officials say, is to retain influence with the new Afghan administration.

On the one hand, Mr. Karzai, who is 56, “wants to leave a legacy and be judged as a true statesman who transferred power peacefully for the first time in Afghanistan,” said Daud Muradian, a former foreign policy adviser to the president who now teaches at the American University of Afghanistan. “At the same time, he is being pulled by his Machiavellian side, and he wants to remain relevant in Afghan politics and be the power behind the next president.”

That may be bad news for Obama administration officials who basically gave up on working with Mr. Karzai after he refused to sign a security deal that would allow American troops to stay past 2014. The leading candidates have all promised to sign the deal if elected, but until then, the United States’ relationship with Mr. Karzai is not over — and he has shown little inclination to hide his disdain.

Late last month, he suddenly took a stance on the Russian annexation of Crimea that directly contradicted the American one: He openly praised the takeover in a fit of pique after seeing reports that the United States might give Pakistan some of the military equipment being shipped out of Afghanistan, senior Afghan officials said.

They say Mr. Karzai saw in the reports new evidence of duplicity by an ally that he believes has undermined him for years. He was against the troop surge, he felt betrayed by American efforts to unseat him in the 2009 election and, more recently, he has come to believe that the United States is in league with Pakistan, and by extension the Taliban.

The ill will is shared by many American officials, who see Mr. Karzai as an unreliable ingrate. But as much as they would prefer to see his influence end, the Americans are still counting on him in one respect: Some hope he can help mediate what is expected to be a messy aftermath of an election season in which candidates have already accused one another of planning to commit fraud and have pledged not to accept the results if they lose.

In a televised speech on Thursday night, Mr. Karzai urged Afghans to work together no matter what the result of the election is.

“Expressing different and opposing views during the election campaign is one of the principles of democracy,” he said. “But I am sure that once the election campaign is over, the candidates will respect people’s votes, prioritize the national interest, and will accept the legitimate results of the election.”

The president’s advisers insist that Mr. Karzai is abiding by that philosophy himself, and that he has let the competing factions within his government support whomever they prefer.

The new first vice president he just appointed, for example, supports the candidate whom Mr. Karzai’s aides say he is most opposed to seeing elected: Abdullah Abdullah, his opponent in the 2009 vote. The aides and several other officials interviewed about Mr. Karzai spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering the president.

A wide array of Western officials concede that Mr. Karzai has allowed a real electoral race to unfold once he helped set the field. But he employed every facet of his influence in shaping that early stage of the campaign, and even seemingly casual asides from the president had telling effects on candidacies over the past year.

After Farooq Wardak, the education minister and an early favorite to become an eventual front-runner, hurt his leg during a trip to the provinces last spring, Mr. Karzai told him in front of the entire cabinet, “That’s what you get when you run too fast to be president,” according to a senior Afghan official who heard the remark.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Even those who had Mr. Karzai’s implicit blessing found they had to tread carefully. When Zalmay Rassoul, who was the foreign minister, began trying to sell himself to potential backers by distancing himself from Mr. Karzai, the president responded by luring away some of Mr. Rassoul’s potential running mates.

Mr. Karzai directed the most prominent of them, Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek warlord who could potentially deliver hundreds of thousands of votes, to join the camp of a rival presidential candidate, Ashraf Ghani, a technocrat who holds a doctorate from Columbia.

“What are you doing going with that old man?” — meaning Mr. Rassoul — Mr. Karzai told Mr. Dostum, according to the senior Afghan official. Mr. Ghani “can get you out of that human rights problem,” a reference to accusations by rights groups that Mr. Dostum had been involved in mass killings.

Mr. Karzai then gave Mr. Ghani $40,000 in cash to seed his campaign war chest and did the same for Mr. Rassoul, with whom he had made peace, two senior Afghan officials said. Both candidates are now considered leading contenders going into Saturday’s election.

Mr. Karzai offered no such deal to his elder brother, Qayum, fearing that the election of another Karzai would tarnish his legacy. Instead, he engaged in a bit of classic Karzai maneuvering to end his brother’s candidacy, orchestrating a meeting of ethnic Pashtun elders, who, after some initial drama, dutifully recommended that the president’s brother join the Rassoul camp.

Officials close to the president say that over the past month, Mr. Karzai has been notably more relaxed. His brother’s bowing out was one point of relief, and the other, they say, came after he began having to deal with Americans less. Since he rejected the Obama administration’s pressure to sign the security deal, visits by American officials have slowed to a trickle, pleasing him immensely.

“There are things he has decided in his mind,” said Umar Daudzai, the interior minister and Mr. Karzai’s former chief of staff. “When you are not sure, you are not relaxed.”

Officials said he had started spending more time with his three children, including his newborn daughter. And he spent whole days micromanaging the preparation of his new secure compound next to the presidential palace, the officials said, fixating on details like what kind of doorknobs to install.

But he still has his eyes set on the work ahead, the Afghan officials said, and his ideal role would be to work with the next administration by doing what he does best: presiding over meetings with elders, villagers and power brokers of all stripes, helping keep the country together. He could also focus on trying to persuade the Taliban to talk peace.

Until then, Afghans will see “the same Karzai we’ve seen for as long as he’s been President Karzai,” one former adviser said. “It’s going to be his government to the end. And no one’s going to be surprised if it’s his government after.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 4, 2014, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Karzai Is Trying to Keep His Sway After Term Ends. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe